Eyebrows were raised when US President Joe Biden met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on September 20 and commented that no Jew anywhere in the world is safe without Israel.
Jewish leaders referred to the president’s comments as unprecedented. In fact, Biden was even more explicit in 2015, when he was vice president. That was when, as reported at the time by The Jerusalem Post, he told Jewish American leaders that they should look to Israel, and not the US, as the ultimate guarantor of their community’s long-term safety.
These sentiments are very distant from those expressed in 1897 by the Central Conference of American Rabbis, which disapproved of any attempt to establish a Jewish state, declaring “America is our Zion” (Donald Neff, Fallen Pillars, 1995).
The settled and prosperous American Jews of that time, mainly of German origin, believed in social assimilation. Their social position and wealth proved to them that the American melting pot worked. The last thing they wanted was to bring into question their loyalty to the land that had brought them a comfortable and secure life.
The American Jewish Committee (AJC) is the oldest existing American Jewish advocacy group. It was established in 1906 by prominent American Jews (primarily from Reform and Conservative backgrounds) to protect the welfare of Russian Jews, who were the targets of deadly pogroms. It did not originally support the Zionist agenda. While the AJC approved of the Balfour Declaration, it qualified its support by noting that Palestine would be a sanctuary for only a part of the Jewish people; most would continue to live elsewhere and enjoy full civil and religious liberty.
Matters came to a head at the Biltmore Conference (the hotel venue), held in New York City in 1942 during World War II and against the backdrop of the Holocaust. The conference called for the establishment of an independent Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine. The AJC, which advocated for focusing on the rescue of Europe’s Jews, was still opposed to the idea of a Jewish state. At the time of Biltmore, the enormity of the Holocaust was not certain. There was still hope that millions of Jews would survive the war.
With the war’s end, the scope of the tragedy was clear and the need for an independent Jewish state was undeniable. How many lives could have been saved had a state existed? Where were the surviving 250,000 Jews in DP camps to go?
In 1950 Israel was a tiny beleaguered country inundated with hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe and the Middle East. To ensure American Jewish financial support, then-prime minister David Ben-Gurion, met with Jacob Blaustein, the president of the AJC, and acknowledged that America was the primary focus of American Jews. Jewish immigration to Israel from the US would be welcome, but American Jews would not be subject to pressure to do so (Encyclopedia Judaica, Second Edition, 2006).
The situation today
Today, the situation is very different. The stated mission of the American Jewish Committee is to enhance the well-being of the Jewish people and Israel. Beginning in 2019, and perhaps in reaction to events such as the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, when white supremacists chanted “Jews will not replace us,” the AJC has conducted an annual survey of antisemitism in the US. The results, solicited from both Jewish and non-Jewish Americans, clearly indicate that antisemitism is a growing and worrisome problem in the United States.
These results, along with the annual audit of anti-Jewish incidents in the US, carried out by the Anti-Defamation League, as well as the obvious protective measures taken at Jewish institutions and synagogues throughout North America, point to what Biden’s comments are all about.
Overall, American Jews have done very well in all respects, perhaps better than in any other Diaspora in the history of the Jewish people. Yet, when it comes to personal safety for Jews, even America cannot match the security offered by the existence of an independent Jewish state, the State of Israel. America is not the new Zion after all.
The writer, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, who taught at the University of Waterloo.